OSU expands foreign medical work

Friday

Nov 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMNov 30, 2012 at 11:38 AM

A local $5 million grant seeks to raise Ohio State University's standing in global medicine and advance its humanitarian work overseas by cementing OSU Wexner Medical Center's ties to the Global Health Delivery Partnership in Boston.

Ben Sutherly, The Columbus Dispatch

A local $5 million grant seeks to raise Ohio State University’s standing in global medicine and advance its humanitarian work overseas by cementing OSU Wexner Medical Center’s ties to the Global Health Delivery Partnership in Boston.

The corporate gift from the Greif Packaging Charitable Trust was announced yesterday at the McCoy Community Center for the Arts in New Albany.

OSU President E. Gordon Gee declared the partnership part of “the land-grant mission of the 21st century,” one that will bring opportunity to Third World residents through improved quality of life.

Dr. Steven Gabbe, CEO of Wexner Medical Center, said he thinks the alliance opens new doors for students and clinical faculty members and will spur “exponential” growth of the medical center’s global-health program.

“I think we are now partnering with the leading program in global health,” Gabbe said.

Half of the $5 million gift will go to Ohio State. The rest will go to the Global Health Delivery Partnership, which includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Harvard Medical School and Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit that employs a variety of tactics to improve the health of the poor in the developing world.

Although Ohio State will use some of its share of the funding for part-time faculty hires, it plans to spend the bulk of it overseas, said Dr. Daniel Sedmak, director of Wexner Medical Center’s Office of Global Health.

Here’s how the initiative will work: Ohio State experts in maternal and neonatal care, and those adept at dealing with high-risk pregnancies, will travel to Haiti to learn low-cost, effective techniques of delivering health care from Partners in Health. They’ll then be deployed to Haiti and other parts of the world such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda to set up prenatal clinics and other limited-resource health centers, then train professionals to take over that work.

There’s growing interest in global health among medical students, more than 60 of whom already receive stipends from Ohio State each year to work overseas, Sedmak said. Enhancing the university’s reputation in the field should attract promising students and grow the discipline in Columbus, he said.

“I’m not aware of a university using all of its interdisciplinary resources ... to go in with Partners in Health and learn how to best deliver this type of health care,” Sedmak said.

On hand was internationally known humanitarian Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health and the subject of the 2003 best-seller Mountains Beyond Mountains.

The grant furthers work that complements Delaware, Ohio-based Greif’s industrial-packaging business. One of its products, PackH20, is a backpack that helps residents of developing countries carry water more comfortably. The backpack includes a removable liner that can be sanitized through exposure to sunlight.